Naughty Dog: Ellie change in TLOU to show “younger teen more fitting to the story”

Naughty Dog has said the change to Ellie that was shown in the new trailer for The Last of Us last night was partly because it wanted a character that fitted more with the story.

When the game was announced at the VGAs in December, the female lead clearly had a bit inspiration from Juno and Inception actress Ellen Page.

Speaking with IGN, creative director Neil Druckmann said the change came about so it showed a “younger teen” that connected more with the plot and with the personality of the character’s actress Ashley Johnson.

“When we came up with the character of Ellie we put a lot of thought into what we wanted her to look like, researching the facial proportions, coloring and bone structures of dozens of faces and bodies. In addition to this, we held numerous casting sessions to ensure we had the right performance capture artist to represent Ellie, eventually selecting actress Ashley Johnson,” said Druckmann.

“As we’re still in the midst of development with The Last of Us, the team has been continuing to put a lot of thought into the creation of Ellie. After delving further into the game’s narrative over the past few months, we decided to modify Ellie’s model to better reflect Ashley’s personality, and also resemble a slightly younger teen more fitting to the story.

“We’re happy with the final result shown in the cinematic we have released today, and hope the fans like her too.”

For Naughty Dog, all hands are on deck for development and a massive showing at E3 in a few weeks, according to game director Bruce Straley.

“Our team has been working hard to have something ready at E3 that will please our fans. We’d love to say more, but we don’t want to spoil anything.”

Watch the brilliant looking trailer here. The Last of Us launches either at the end of this year or early next year for PS3.

ND use ingame assets and pre-render the cutscens with a farm of PS3's do the work, its rendered on multiple PS3's then converted to a movie. So its a cutscene, not actual "in game" rendered.
Extra effects such as subsurface scattering, atmosphere effects, decent AA etc are all added.
Models generally are the same, not so sure about the textures though.

No, I think you're right. But it would be harder to tell the difference with the finished product. I was looking at the screenshots uploaded to the site back in March and it looks like they could still polish the visuals. Still pretty impressive for 6-year old technology.

ND use ingame assets and pre-render the cutscens with a farm of PS3's do the work, its rendered on multiple PS3's then converted to a movie. So its a cutscene, not actual "in game" rendered.
Extra effects such as subsurface scattering, atmosphere effects, decent AA etc are all added.
Models generally are the same, not so sure about the textures though.

Looks pre rendered to me but hell I said that about some scenes in U2 and I was wrong, so I wouldn't put it past ND for this to be ingame render.

The Last of Us, the new trailer is entirely in-game movie Word of Naughty Dog!

The new trailer released today by The Last of Us, was stunned by the extreme attention to detail and overall quality extremely high.

The first thing we thought was in the newsroom is that in computer graphics. For the avoidance of doubt, I personally contacted Eric Monacelli, community manager of Naughty Dog, saying on twitter that "the new movie theaters is very nice. I think is CG-executed engine, the details are too high for real- time on the PS3. "

The answer is rather: "is a movie entirely in-game!"

So the video was captured by the title running on PlayStation 3 and, as it did with Uncharted 3, the cut scenes are rendered with the game engine making the most of the computing power of the console, which can in these phases have the better hardware, not occupied by gameplay.

Yup. The pre-rendered scenes in UC3 look really good, but in game play when controlling the character, it looks normal but still looks really good. UC3 when it came out was my favorite looking game (and still is in my top 3 all time games).

Yup. The pre-rendered scenes in UC3 look really good, but in game play when controlling the character, it looks normal but still looks really good. UC3 when it came out was my favorite looking game (and still is in my top 3 all time games).

True.. I expect TLOU to look good but not as good as those videos. We aren't quite there yet with gameplay.

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